Another year, another Assassin's Creed. Thankfully Ubisoft has decided to take a chill pill this year and not put out a full open world game. Gives me time to catch up on a series that I enjoy, although maybe not for the same reasons as everyone.
Alright, so as is usual the game was developed and published by the folks over at Ubisoft and its available on all the major consoles and systems.
As I'm sure you've inferred from the image above this game is set in the United Kingdom, specifically its set in late 1800's London a period of time when the world was still dominated by Europe and London was more at the center of this world than it is in our own. As usual, the city looks great, the city is alive, the neighborhoods are distinct and its a just a busy place to be in. The game did a great job of realizing London much as they did with Paris in Assassin's Creed: Unity. I only experienced some minor graphical glitches here and there, so I'm really not bothered about the look or performance of the game. The carriages were also realized very well and I enjoyed the combat with them.
My only actual gripe that is a little bit visual and a little bit game play related is that the character models in the game felt limited, there were only like 5 or 6 enemy and ally units that you interacted with the entire game and that felt pretty stale and cookie cutter. It was really easy to spot enemies in the crowds on London even without the eagle vision and when engaging in fights you could easy tell how a fight was going to turn out. As usual I feel the game play is to simple and easy, but maybe that is kind of the point of all of these open world action games now, none of the new powers in the game are simply given to with the passage of time and the game never really gets any harder or easier as you play in terms of its demands on your skills. Its mostly a test of your patience and endurance since the enemies in harder areas just have more health and hit harder, they don't actually do anything faster or require any new tactics from you to deal with so the game play felt the game the entire way through. The mechanic of having you be capable of switching between two different assassin's with slightly different gameplay mechanics was novel, but it wasn't really that remarkable since both of the Assassin's pretty much play the same, but I guess it was nice to allow the writers to have a more complex narrative.
Getting to the narrative, since the Assassin's Creed series is supposed to be a deep franchise with its lore and so on. The overall narrative of the modern conflict between Templars and Assassin's pretty much didn't change at all, and its never really explained who you are and why you are even helping the Assassin's at this point. We just a get a bit more about the Precursors being behind the current drive to access some of these ancient items and that they are going to be coming back 'soon', I put that in quotation marks since they have been coming back since the third Assassin's Creed. Sinking into the London narrative, the main characters are fun and likable and it personally felt like a fun and light adventure. This being 1800's London there were also a ton of characters and historical figures to draw on and involve in the story and that helped bring the game to life, I don't get why by default they have to always side with the Assassins. Due to the narrative being so superficial it was hard for me to really delve deep into the game, I lost interest pretty much as soon as the main story was done and I only did part of the WWI DLC. All the other DLC I pretty much ignored since I simply didn't care to keep playing the same game play over and over again despite it involving figures like Karl Marx, Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin and so on.
Overall, I had fun playing Syndicate, but I think that might be because Assassin's Creed: Unity and Assassin's Creed 3 were really unremarkable games. But at this point, I don't even know if I would recommend the game to someone that isn't already invested in the series. Because it feels like the writers have completely lost track of what is supposed to be happening and very little actually happens in the overall narrative in terms of progression but at the same time so much has been done you can't understand who all these people are anymore. But, if you were going to put a gun to my head, or a blade to my neck and force me to have to choose, an Assassin's Creed game it would at this point be a choice between this one and Black Flag.
No comments:
Post a Comment